Self-assessment of the quality of the maintenance work
Hello,
I would like to propose something new that would partially supersede the
work done by the MIA team and that would also generate new information
somehow related to the topic of WNPP.
The basic idea is quite simple, we want to ensure that each package is
maintained as well as possible and for this we need to ensure that
it has one or more active maintainer(s). Hence every X months, each
maintainer receives a mail with a link to a web form where he'll have a
list of all the packages that he maintains/co-maintains and for each
package he has to answer several questions that explain his relationship
with the package (the answer are preseeded with the values he selected
the previous time so that he can quickly skim over it if nothing has
changed):
- what kind of maintainer he is
- active (responding quickly, forwarding bugs, …)
- passive (responds only to major problems)
- backup (not doing anything unless solicited)
- if the package needs an active maintainer or not (most perl modules are
well maintained with a single "passive" maintainer)
- if the package needs help from another volunteer
We could integrate various heuristics/data in the process to help the
maintainer recognize that he's (not) keeping up and that he needs help
or maybe that he's no more "active" but only "passive".
If the maintainer doesn't respond, he automatically enters the MIA
process and the package is quickly marked as needing help/attention
from someone else.
The collation of all those data will give us a better view on the
maintenance status of each package and it could be displayed on the PTS.
We could also use those info to direct new contributors to help in
existing packages instead of packaging new stuff.
What do you think of the idea ?
I would like to formalize the idea a bit more and we could use the DEP
process for this. I would be willing to work on the implementation once
we agree on the process.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog
Le best-seller français mis à jour pour Debian Etch :
http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/
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